Hi again, friends! This is Evan, here to reflect a little bit on our anthology’s wrap-around scenes, which we call The Grand Theatre. These scenes feature the lead characters from our five segments (played by Juli Cuccia, Glen Ratcliffe, Grace Lee, Evan Marshall, and Lauren Elyse Buckley), as well as a batch of puppets! Jenn and I co-directed these scenes, which were written by Brooks Smith. Jenn handled the cinematography, and I served as lead puppeteer (one of the puppets is kind of a self-portrait).
Although this was the last material to be scripted and shot, the concept – evil puppets telling people their fates – was the starting point for the whole project. Jenn and I had been up in Portland to shoot a video for Animal Aid (https://animalaidpdx.org/), and on the way home we missed our flight, so we ended up having to sit around one of the airport bars for a few hours, which left us time to kick around concepts for our thesis. We’d briefly talked about doing an anthology movie previously, but hadn’t given it much thought. On this occasion, I mentioned the set of puppets that my mother and I had made about ten years prior that I’d never really come up with a good use for, and something just clicked for us: of course those puppets were destined to narrate an anthology horror movie!
The tone and basic structure for the wrap-arounds emerged pretty quickly, but then, as we threw ourselves into writing the individual segments, the wrap-arounds got pushed to the side for a while. As we moved into production on the early segments, the time we had available for writing narrowed.
One late night, as we were settling into bed, I threw on a Muppet Show DVD. As we lay there laughing at absurd vaudevillian puppet humor, Jenn suddenly turned to me and said, “We should ask Brooks to write the wrap-around scenes!”
I don’t know why we hadn’t reached that conclusion months earlier, because in retrospect it seems like it was always meant to be. If ever a man has been born to blend the cute, the clever, the absurd and the disturbing, that man is Brooks Smith (I hope he takes that as a compliment).
At the time of this writing, my friendship with Brooks dates back a little over 20 years, and we’ve written together on-and-off for… I dunno, 18 or 19 years? We found pretty early on that we had very compatible and complementary voices, especially when writing comedy. But Brooks is not only a good gag writer, he’s also a keen student of human behavior, and that served him well here; framing these stories required the puppets to get inside our characters’ heads, which meant that Brooks had to get inside their heads, as well.
We shot The Grand Theatre at the Archway Studio/Theater in North Hollywood over two days in July of this year, wrapping nearly nine months after we began production on our first segment. We were prepared for a lot of challenges in juggling five leads and relying so heavily on puppet work – none of us are professional puppeteers, and we did not take that task lightly – but by this point we’d built an extremely skilled, efficient crew, and our actors knew their characters so damned well that these ended up being the smoothest shooting days of the entire production.
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